The Sympathizer
A communist double agent flees Saigon in 1975 and lands in Los Angeles, where he spies on his fellow exiles while losing himself between identities. Nguyen wrote the great Vietnamese American novel: bitter, hilarious, intellectually relentless. It won the 2016 Pulitzer and demolished the idea that the Vietnam War belongs to American storytellers alone.
Length is the sharpest 2-star complaint, readers naming the Hollywood film-production section as the digression they’d cut first, one saying the book “could have been about one hundred and fifty pages shorter.” Others fault the prose itself as overworked, one calling it “a lot of adjectives and description and over-writing,” and a further reader reports the ironic, detached voice kept them intellectually engaged but left the book “empty of any type of emotion.” The Pulitzer win primed real expectations that some readers say the novel didn’t meet, one admitting outright “I’m SO ANGRY this won the Pulitzer Prize.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
